Categories
Weather

Tonight’s storm, brought to you by the Day After

I couldn’t believe it when I heard the tornado alarm tonight. The sky didn’t look that bad. The problem is that the storms always come from the back of us so we can’t see the storms coming.

Tonight’s was not fun. Tonight’s was, frankly, scary. At one point the lightning and rain and winds were so strong, I thought we were in the path of the twister. The water was over a foot in parts of the parking lot. We didn’t get hail tonight, though.

They say that you can hear a tornado coming, it sounds like a train. But how can you hear it coming when the thunder is continuous, not to mention the tornado alert and the alarms of the fire engines and police? That’s the worse – not being able to see what’s happening. All you can do is listen.

Twisters did touch down with this storm. They just said that one touched down at Grey Summit–that’s where I walk in Shaw’s Nature Reserve. More alarms just now. Our power lines are buried, so we still have power. Illinois is getting hammered. And to the south.

I think we should create a Tornado watch syndication feed. Maybe something we can ping if our area gets hit. Hear from other people sharing in the fun. I sure wouldn’t mind talking with people who’ve been through a tornado – what do they really sound like?

More storm pictures. Damn, they just issued another tornado watch. And DeSoto just got another tornado. I remember:

 

“Why worry”, she said. “Worry just makes you look old.”

I bet that movie, The Day After does really well throughout the Midwest. They couldn’t have planned better promotion.

Categories
Weather

Tornado alert

Sirens just went off. Neighbor said tornado spotted. According to weather reports, we’re in the path.

Maybe the tornado will chase me…

Update

The storm hit. The alarm went off twice. The neighbors ducked into their bathrooms.

But me and Zoe were brave. We faced the storm. We stood our ground, even when the lightning blasted through the complex and waters rushed through. When the birds flocked away, and the wind chimes rang out. Even when I was soaked to the skin, and then became truly wet. Just to get photos for you, dear readers. Just to get photos for you.

By the way, I’m mobloging this from Oz. The Wiz says hi. She gave me a new pair of ruby sneakers, so I guess pink is the new black. However, she said I can click my heels together till my feet are bruised and bloody, but I can damn well get my own butt home.

And would I please move the house from on top of Dave Winer?

Categories
Weblogging

Ghosts in the machine

Two long time friends from this world have decided to fold up their blogs, at least for now. Possibly even permanently.

The first is our friend from South Africa, Farrago. As she writes:

This was fun, but the fun eventually ran out.

The second is our friend from the UK, Gary Turner, who writes:

What’s brought this sudden change of heart? Frankly, and I’m not sure if I’m 100% on the ball with this, it’s an identity crisis that was quietly baked in from the very beginning but which lately, has been surfaced and exacerbated by my recent spate of meetings. In short, my blog self is not my entire self and I must say that I’ve been cool with that as long as both of those two selves never happen to appear together in the same room. When that happens, it shines a spotlight right on top of that partial disclosure or split identity issue and this is something I’m finding uncomfortable to reconcile.

This isn’t a profound real life personal identity crisis thing, it’s just something that I’ve recently come to notice and realise is a conflict in my blogging terms of reference, and it’s a conflict which seems to have mortally wounded my blogging self.

Farrago brought us Charlie and penguins and beer bottle art. And I remember when Gary and Mike Golby used to back and forth about ‘porridgeboy’. Lately, though, everyone is all serious. Iraq. War. Bush. Outsourcing. Patriot Act. Social Software. Politics. Copyright. Rape. Starvation. Aids. People being hurt and hurting others. Technorati 100, and A listers. Journal versus weblog. Nosy news people crashing the party. Making the Money, baby.

But you know something? We had all this back ‘then’, too. It’s hard to go back to ‘porridgeboy’ and penguin games, when whatever we had then, we don’t have now; and we’re not even sure what it was that we once had.

I’ve been having a conversation, if conversation is the right word for email exchanges, with a long-distance friend about the reality of this environment, and that split between our real selves, and the people we create online. Dave Rogers’ captures this best with:

As authors, we’re too clever by half. We seduce ourselves with the beauty of our writing, until our attention becomes focused on the words and not on the existence. This is ego. We can, and usually do, become trapped in our narratives. Our choices constrained by the character we’ve constructed, by the plot holes we wish to avoid, or ignore. And it’s not just individuals, entire communities, countries, religions, political parties, families, any group of human beings that share a common set of beliefs and goals, all of them can become trapped in their own narratives as well. There’s a lot of that going around these days.

I think it’s truer to say that we’re not “writing ourselves into existence.” Rather, we’re writing ourselves out of existence. We cease to be people, and instead become characters and plot devices.

We’re writing ourselves out of existence, whether we continue to weblog or not. True ghosts in the machine. Or poppies, hidden behind the larger, showier flowers until one day we notice they’re gone.

So we stand in the doorway waving good-bye and cry out, “Good luck Gary and Lynette”, before shutting the door; knowing that if they happen to miss us someday, or miss this funny, bizarre, sad, lonely, non-existent existence we all share, no door can stop a ghost from returning. And anyone can reinvent themselves online, if they wish.

As Dave Rogers says, Don’t believe everything you read. Least of all, what you read here.

Categories
Weather

Third major storm in four days

We just got another major thunderstorm alert–the third in four days; plus flooding and an occasional tornado warning. I’ll take pictures of any funnel clouds heading this way. Really. Honest. I’m not going to be a scaredy baby diving for shelter when I can have a chance to take a tornado picture for you all.

The thunderstorms have been the worst I’ve seen, before or after moving to Missouri. Yesterday afternoon the sound was so bad, and everything was shaking so much, that all I wanted to do was join Zoe hiding under the bed. The hail hit the roof and the windows so hard that at one point, I thought one of the windows was cracked. I expect hail damage to Golden Girl this year, because all indications are, it’s going to be a long, stormy summer.

Speaking of which, I’ve traded cars with my roommate for the summer. I get better gas mileage, and this helps with his longish commute. He has an eleven year old van that’s been through the wars, and I’m looking to do a little tornado chasing this year.

I’ve been studying the meteorology on tornadoes for two years, in addition to the behavior of storms in Missuori, and I’m ready to give it a shot; at least, locally. I’ve always loved weather, and I need a little adventure in my life.

Scratch that–I need a lot of adventure in my life.

Of course, we have to discount the fact that yesterday I was ready to hide under the bed with my cat.

Categories
Technology Weblogging

Did the port thing

I wrote this before running into the magic quote problem in last post

I created another WordPress weblog today by copying the database and files from this weblog, and then once created, upgraded all the files to 1.2. I needed an environment identical to this one to make my edits so that upgrading this site would be relatively risk free.

To create the second database, I used mysqldump to download a copy the contents of the existing one, created a new database, and then loaded the data from the dump. Once I copied the files, I modified the wp-config.php file to point to the temporary database, and started to work.

I received my first comment spam within an hour of creating the duplicate weblog, and received a comment by someone who came in through Google within two hours. And during my effort, the original weblog was hit by a comment spam attack, which played havoc with my effort (me wondering what I was doing wrong to be generating all these ‘approve comment’ requests in the inbox). However, thanks to the attack, I found I had an error in my crapflood protection; fixing it should prevent manage these attacks in the future.

The first edit I made was to modify the upload.php file to incorporate a modification that wraps a thumbnail image with a hypertext link to the larger photo. I then tried this on a photo of another major storm that hit St. Louis today.

The next modifications were to copy the edited wp-comments.php and wp-comments-post.php files, and replace the top part of the wp-comments.php with the new code in the upgrade (everything above the line). All my edits I could save, as is–including the live preview from Chris Davis. There’s also a new plugin for WordPress 1.2 that provides a preview page for comments, and I may add that as an option for people who don’t have Javascript enabled.

The next change was to add the entry into menu.php for my Switch blogs multiple blog handler, in addition to using the install-multi-php file I wrote to create the table. All that was left then was copying the switch.php file into the wp-admin directory.

Following the previous discussion on multiple weblogs, I also deleted the wp-images, wp-contents ,and wp-includes directory for the new installation and created a symbolic link to their counter-parts in the first test WordPress 1.2 weblog directory location. By doing so, the plugins I’ve downloaded or created for my other WordPress directories are now available for this one.

Include the my_recent_comments list that feeds the sidebar–my processing includes links to comment authors web sites and a few other odds and ends not provided by any existing WP function or plugin.

After making sure comments work, I then decided to have some fun and play with the CSS for the WordPress administration pages. I didn’t change much: added some background color, and some border effects for the buttons. I also changed the background color for the ‘look at me’ events such as deleting a post. Instead of that glaring red, I have a nice dark blue. The darkness is alert enough – never depend on color to ensure that a person pays attention to what they’re doing.

I rather like my new WordPress Admin look. It’s a newer, kinder, gentler WordPress…that just happens to work the same no matter what pretty pretty we do to the CSS.

Currently, WordPress supports moderation for all posts, or none. I’ve always liked turning moderation on by item, which I implemented in WordPress 1.02. To carry this forward, after upgrading the database during the 1.2 upgrade process, I had to use phpMyAdmin to add the ‘moderated’ option to the comment_status field in the wp_posts table.

The code to manage moderated comments in wp-comments.php didn’t need to change. But if you’re interested in adding this modification to your setup, first of all, look for the following line using your text editor:

<?php if (’open’ == $post->comment_status) { ?>

And replace it with:

<?php if ($post->comment_status ==’open’ || $post->comment_status == ‘moderated’ ) { ?>

After the line to create the “Leave a Comment”, add the following, but edit the message to whatever you want:

<?php

if ($post->comment_status==’moderated’)
echo(“Use your own moderation message here, complete with HTML formatting”);
?>

Save the file, and then open wp-comments-post.php and look for the following:

if ( ‘closed’ == $wpdb->get_var(“SELECT comment_status FROM $tableposts WHERE ID = ‘$comment_post_ID’”) )
die( __(’Sorry, comments are closed for this item.’) );

With the following:

$commentstatus = $wpdb->get_var(“SELECT comment_status FROM $tableposts WHERE ID = $comment_post_ID”);
if (’closed’ == $commentstatus)
die(’Sorry, comments are closed for this item.’);

Then look for the the following line:

$wpdb->query(“INSERT INTO $tablecomments

And insert the following code before this line:

if ($commentstatus == ‘moderated’) {
$moderation_notify = true;
$approved = 0;
}
else
$approved = 1;

Save the file. The last change then is to add the ‘moderated’ option in the advanced editing form, as shown in the following screen shot. Rather than talk you through this, a copy of my changes files is contained in zip file at the end of this writing.

Wordpress 1.2 Screenshot of moderated modification

This is the only change on this page–I also have added a link to my preview page.

Currently WordPress uses the same page, index.php, to serve all requests: archives, category, individual pages and so on. I don’t necessarily like the same look with each page, so I copied it into category.php and individual.php.

The pages themselves don’t need to change, other than to modify the look into what you prefer for these pages. But to ensure they’re called, I needed to modify my .htaccess file to point to these pages, rather than index.php:

RewriteRule ^archives/([0-9]{4})?/?([0-9]{1,2})?/?([0-9]{1,2})?/?([0-9a-z-]+)?/?([0-9]+)?/?$ /individual.php?year=$1&monthnum=$2&day=$3&name=$4&page=$5 [QSA]
RewriteRule ^archives/category/?(.*) /category.php?category_name=$1 [QSA]

To create my preview page, I copied individual.php to preview.php and made one modification to the code: it now calls a file called wp-blog-draft-header.php rather than wp-blog-header.php. This new file is an exact copy of the old one except for one change:

Look for:

$where .= ‘ AND (post_status = “publish”‘;

And replace with:

$where .= ‘ AND (post_status = “draft”‘;

Save the file, and now I have a preview page. You can take a look at it with a post kept in draft state.

WordPress 1.2 does have a page preview located at the bottom of the edit page, but I like the ability to preview the writing within the context. Especially when using my photos, I need to know how they look in context.

The file upload, individual moderated comments, and full page preview (and the new look and feel) are the first phase of modifications. The second is to add another page and menu option to manually generate a static page from any given page; a plugin that can be used to statically generate the index.php and syndication feeds; and selecting comments by date range to easily delete a comment spam attack.

You can get a copy of the files discussed in this writing here. If you decide to play with any of this, make sure you back your files up first.